Disapproving the Action of the District of Columbia Council in Approving the Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, I want to just say that I respect and am grateful for the generosity of the chairman, the Senator from Oregon, for allowing me to slip in and say some remarks.

I want to thank Senator Van Hollen for his incredible leadership on this issue.

I have the distinction of being the only one of the 100 Senators who was actually born in Washington, DC. This is the city my parents met in. This is the city they married in. My mom worked for the DC Public Schools. My father was one of the first Black salesmen hired in the entire DC region by the company IBM. I owe this city so much, and I am disappointed that there is nobody in this body who was officially elected to speak for this city.

Washington, DC, is suffering, as it has, from a violation of one of our most sacrosanct principles of the country, which is this idea that this democracy is rooted in the ideal of representative democracy, the separation of powers, and most certainly the idea that you can't have taxation without representation. In fact, DC residents pay more per capita in Federal taxes than any other State, but yet they have no say in the Federal Government.

Madam President, 700,000 Americans, in one of the only expressions of representative democracy available to them, have 13 council people who were part of a process. As was said already by my colleague, the council members completed the monumental task of modernizing the 120- year-old DC Criminal Code to make it more consistent, clarifying conflicting provisions, and bringing it in line not just with current best practices reflected in the majority of States' criminal codes but in trying to address the urgencies of the moment wherein you have a city that is deeply concerned about the crime in its community.

DC's efforts are not unique. There are 37 States that have gone through similar processes--so-called red States, so-called blue States, and purple States.

The process was spearheaded, as my colleague said, by the independent DC Criminal Code Reform Commission, which was a nonpartisan agency that was very representative of prosecutors and victims' rights advocates. All of these nonpolitical people came and unanimously endorsed what we have before us today.

Now, the first time any partisan politician got involved was with the City Council just voting to confirm this nonpartisan body's unanimous recommendations. It was to that process that the Republican leader said: Oh, it looks like, with what they did, they are in need of adult supervision.

Think of how patronizing and paternalistic that is for this body, not being any part of this process, now suddenly saying they need adult supervision as if they are children.

The DC Criminal Code was about keeping DC safe. It is what the prosecutors involved said and what the U.S. Attorney's Office said: We need to do this to create a safer city because of the confusion in the code and the lack of having criminal penalties at all for certain crimes. All of these things opened up opportunities for DC not to have the security they wanted. So this was about DC's safety.

Unfortunately, it is now embroiled in scare tactics, where political, opportunistic actions are taking place to try to use this as a way to win political points. Even the media, for whom I have tremendous respect for its role, has been more keen on asking questions about the political analysis than actually the facts of what DC has done.

What DC has done in this bill is to actually create a tougher element on crime, tougher laws on crime. In looking at the totality of this bill, it is impossible to say that it isn't about making DC safer and having tougher penalties on crime.

My colleague went through some of this. It actually quadruples the maximum penalty for attempted murder, and it triples the maximum penalty for sexual assault because people in DC see those as serious crimes, and they want to seriously increase the consequences for them.

DC is pro-police officer, so what did they do? They doubled the maximum penalty for misdemeanor assaults on police officers, and they increased by 40 percent the maximum penalty for a felony assault on a police officer.

Washington, DC, knows that there is too much gun violence and that they need to take action against it, so it quadruples the maximum penalty for the possession of assault rifles, for ghost guns, for restricted explosive devices. I know the NRA doesn't want laws like this, but DC residents do. It doubles the maximum penalties for possession of a firearm or a bump stock--tougher laws on guns, more serious penalties.

DC's Criminal Code actually modernizes and creates new categories of offenses that aren't currently crimes. It creates new offenses for negligent homicide. It creates new offenses for reckless endangerment with a firearm. It creates new offenses by expanding liability for sexual assault, including for the sexual abuse of a minor. It expands liability for the possession of sexual images of children.

This is a city that came together and said: We want to protect our children. We want to protect sexual assault victims. We want to better protect our police officers. We want to better protect people from murder. But no. This body now, in a rush of politics, is going to prevent a city from protecting itself.

It actually increases the protections for domestic violence victims. It criminalizes strangulation as a felony, which is currently very difficult to even prosecute. In fact, every State but South Carolina has closed this loophole, but this body is going to stop them from doing it today. It criminalizes nonconsensual conduct as a felony and quadruples the maximum penalty. It helps the victims of domestic violence better obtain civil protection orders because the current law lacks clarity and makes it very hard to do this.

Let me say this again. By rejecting this law today, by voting against this, people, in the name of being tough on crime, are actually the people who are preventing a city from better protecting itself--from better protecting its children, its sexual assault victims, its police officers. I mean, think about that.

I have not, in my 10 years in the Senate, seen such a distortion of facts, such a misrepresentation of what something is. The RCCA sets new maximum penalties for armed carjackings--my friend talked about that-- and their carjacking laws now have a maximum penalty higher than Georgia, Kansas, North Dakota, and Kentucky. Maybe we should do a unanimous consent request right now saying that Kentucky is too soft on crime because DC wants higher maximum penalties.

It sets new maximum penalties for unarmed carjackings higher than Georgia, higher than Iowa, higher than North Dakota, higher than Tennessee and Kentucky. The very Senators coming down here to criticize laws--Senators from Tennessee I have seen today, from Kentucky, from Iowa--actually, their States have lower maximum penalties than what DC is trying to do, but they are going to stop DC from doing it.

Armed robbery, the same thing--higher maximum penalties than North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio.

The same thing for unarmed robbery--higher than Kansas, higher than South Dakota, higher than Tennessee, the sponsor of this bill, and Kentucky.

Yes, they may be lowering the maximum penalty, but it is still higher than so many States of the Republicans pushing this bill and not speaking to the facts of it.

I am a former big-city mayor, and there are communities like Washington, DC, all over this country that are trying to fight crime. Many of them have significant numbers of African Americans as a percentage of their population who have higher rates of victimization. Those cities are grappling with this. They feel a sense of urgency.

That is why this bill actually is raising penalties, putting in new criminal statutes, and making sure that so many of their laws are tougher than even many of the red States, like Kentucky and Tennessee here.

That is what happens in a city that has elected representatives that know that their No. 1 job is to protect the community because those communities often are being more victimized than Senators and their families are in their States.

Give DC what we believe was a revolutionary idea then but not a revolutionary idea now, which is to let them protect themselves. Don't strip them of their ability to protect themselves. Don't take away their ability to protect their children. Don't take away their ability to create laws that protect their police officers. Don't take away their ability in this law to protect their citizens--700,000 residents who do not have a voice in this body, 700,000 residents who are about to have a law that will better protect them overturned because of politics, because of opportunism, because of the big divisions in our country that tear our Nation apart.

But DC is united in its fight for self-determination, for representation, for safety, and security. Those are the ideals that started America, and this body shouldn't interrupt a city trying to live its American ideals that we take for granted but they, obviously, today, are still fighting for.

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